Why Simpson Bowles should be DOA

I’ll just sit here and hold my breath! Scott Lemieux:

The problem is that the deficit is nothing like health care. There’s no political dynamic that locks deficit reduction programs into place. Chait is implicitly referring to the bait-and-switch pulled by the Republicans after the Greenspan commission on Social Security and the 1993 Clinton budget deal, in which deficit reductions were used to finance hugely expansive Republican boondoggles like unnecessary, trillion-dollar wars and upper-class tax cuts.   Nothing in a deal would stop the same thing from happening again.  The best proposals in the report — cutting defense spending and agricultural studies, getting rid of the mortgage deduction, ending the special treatment of capital-gains income — would be the hardest to sustain over time. Legislation that provides direct benefits to concentrated, powerful interests while imposing indirect costs on more diffuse, less powerful interests is the easiest kind of legislation to pass. Moreover, this fact is another reason why S/B isn’t a good starting point for a deal, because the best provisions are the least likely to survive the legislative process. We all know that any bill that phases out the mortgage deduction is DOA.

To put it another way, when Chait concedes that Republicans don’t care about the deficit, we can stop right there, because a deficit-reduction deal requires ongoing cooperation between the parties; legislation that is passed today can be changed next year. This cooperation currently doesn’t exist. Therefore, there’s no reason for Democrats to support a deficit-reduction program that isn’t otherwise worth passing on the merits.

Tip courtesy of Thomas Soldan